


The End of Summer

by NaomiLibicki



Category: Diese kalte Nacht | This Cold Night - Faun (Song)
Genre: Extra Treat, First Contact, Folklore, IN SPACE!, Implied Xeno, Other, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, Storytelling, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 01:17:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12519672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NaomiLibicki/pseuds/NaomiLibicki
Summary: In the Summer Cluster, they say--though I don’t know if this is true--death itself was a stranger, and never came tethered to the airlocks, rapping on the gates, bowl in hand and demanding meat.





	The End of Summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).



In the Summer Cluster, there was no night, and the only dark was the pale gray of dusk. In the Summer Cluster, flowers bloomed and never withered. In the Summer Cluster, they say--though I don’t know if this is true--death itself was a stranger, and never came tethered to the airlocks, rapping on the gates, bowl in hand and demanding meat. In the Summer Cluster, lifecrafts floated through calm layers of cloud, rising and falling and circling each other like the dancers in a hop-waltz.

But if you go there now--and why should you? Everything of value has been scavenged long since--you will find only blasted-out shells trailing plastic tubing in the searing wind. Shall I tell you how it happened?

It was when the world was new, and people still knew little of it--little of its beauties, little of its dangers. In those days the clusters were ruled each one by its captain. The captain of the Summer Cluster was a proud man, a wealthy man, who gave gifts with a free hand, whose feast-hall was never empty or silent. He had a daughter, and he called her Rós, named for the flower that perfumed the air of the lifecrafts, and whose fruit was eaten as candy, tart and sweet and bright as a jewel. She was the first storm-speaker. But she had no grandmother to teach her her craft and guide her with wisdom, and she couldn’t read the rune-stones. Her only guide was her own wayward heart.

And one day like all the days in the Summer Cluster, when the air was balmy and the breezes were gentle, Rós put on her wingsuit and went out to fly between the lifecrafts, and there she met a storm, and she became its lover.

She whirled suspended for hours, buffeted by winds, caressed by vapors. How can I describe what she felt, if you have never heard the voice of a storm? But I can tell you this: she never would have come home, if it had been left up to her. She never would have thought of her body’s needs, of food, of hearth, of breath. She would have died in ecstasy.

But her father grew worried when she didn’t return, and he sent out searchers, and they found her and brought her back. All they knew of the storm was wind and flashes of lightning in the clouds, but that was enough to frighten them, for such things were yet unknown in the Summer Cluster.

Rós was raving, half out of her mind when they brought her to her father’s lifecraft. The doctors feared she had contracted some unknown illness, and they put her in quarantine lest she spread it among all their people. But no such thing happened, and gradually she returned to herself.

More than that: before her encounter with the storm, Rós had been a spoiled, flighty girl, unwilling to do any but the lightest work in the gardens. But now she became diligent. She studied life-support tech, and her fingers grew skilled at weaving tubes and mixing gases. The elders said that her brush with death had sobered her, and they nodded to each other approvingly. Until it was too late, they never saw the wildness that she kept hidden in her heart.

Until one night--and I say night, because the clouds gathered so thickly that they cut off all light from the sun, and the air in the lifecrafts grew chill, and frost touched the roots of the flowers in the gardens, and their petals withered and fell. The singing in the feast-hall of the Summer Cluster turned to panicked cries, and the people begged the captain to tell them to tell them what should be done, but he knew no better than they.

The storm, you see, was coming for Rós.

And she put on her wingsuit and went out to meet it gladly, and using the accesses she had learned, she opened the airlocks of all the lifecrafts, and the wind swept through and the lightning blasted them and the vapors scoured clean what was left. No one survived in all of the Summer Cluster. It was only later that strangers came and found a few recordings that had escaped destruction, and learned what had happened. That was how the people discovered what we shared the world with--not what, but who.

It was many years longer, and lifetimes, too, before we learned the ways of the storms and how to live with them, and in many ways they are still strangers in our halls. And we have councils now instead of captains, and the ruins of the Summer Cluster are a curiosity, nothing more, and every cluster has its storm speakers who learn diligently with their grandmothers, and know the reading of the rune-stones.

Rós taught no granddaughters, as she had learned from no grandmother, for she died along with all her kin. She is remembered as a caution against the dangers of an untrained heart and a headstrong nature.

But we--the storm-speakers--remember that she was the first.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, it's just basically the legend of Ys with more alien-fucking.
> 
> You can listen to Diese kalte Nacht [here](https://youtu.be/zr8d9sXioj4). Further suggested listening: [For Science!](https://youtu.be/zeydjADyM7U) by They Might Be Giants.
> 
> I would like to thank E, without whom this story would be a lot less clear.


End file.
